19 May 2016
GM Foods
The effect on British television.
By our Cooking Correspondent
Another first for America. The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine have come down in favour of Frankenstein foods. Now it’s official. A body including more than that 300 Nobel prize winners (gosh, what do you have to do to be left out?) has concluded that genetically modified food is safe for human consumption. All that stuff about cancer, kidney disease, autism and being turned into a robot was just nonsense. There is no evidence that it poses a threat to wildlife either. The birds will continue to sing, and not in digital tweets. Still, you have to wonder whether large fields of uniform crops are quite as good for the propagation of small creepy-crawly things as good old English meadows.
Now this is all good news for the fight against famine and poverty, for the economics of farming and for being able to produce a nice meal for little green men if they arrive from outer space. That, however, is only the half of it. The most important impact will be on cookery. It was only last year that it was discovered that camelina, an oilseed plant, could be modified so that it contained the same nutrients as oily fish. Now what they haven’t told us is what it tastes like. Does it taste like oily fish or does it taste like cattle food? I imagine that the scientists will soon be able to give us a choice. If the Nobel prize winners are clever enough to make one food replicate the nutritional virtues of another, they can presumably work out how to change the flavour at the flick of a genetic switch.
Of course, there is nothing new in this. Heston has devoted his career to making one food taste like another. The new system will, however, be easier and cheaper so that before long there will be three choices to be made before you buy a packet of food at the supermarket. What is it made of? Presumably that will be a cost-driven decision. What nutrients should it have? That is something to be matched against the advice from your dietician. What does it taste of? That is a personal matter. “De gustibus est non disputandum” as the Romans used to say. Anyway I look forward to eating cabbage with the flavour of a fillet steak and the nutritional qualities of sardines.
They should be able to do it with wines as well, although here the technology is already advanced. How often has a wine merchant told you that you can taste the blackberries in his Chateauneuf du Pape, presumably assuming that you really want a glass of fruit juice. Now, however, we will be able to do it the other way round and at the flick of a gene the coarsest new world pinot will be converted into a Gevrey Chambertin. It’s a trick that hasn’t been done since the marriage feast in Cana.
Unfortunately there is a downside to all this. What is going to happen to cooking programmes if you can just point the genetic equivalent of the TV remote and the flavour is changed. Shows like “The Great British Bake-Off” will only be about texture and appearance. That will quite spoil them and I suppose that in the end they will disappear, leaving us to an unending diet of emotionally-damaged detectives chasing psychopathic villains, and young enthusiasts buying or doing up houses. It is only now that one begins to appreciate just how much genetic modification will reduce diversity.
Actually, I don’t think it will happen. The fact that modified foods may be harmless does not mean that the EU will approve them for consumption. There are plenty of objectors who will try to stop them from doing so. Greenpeace, for example, is concerned about interbreeding with natural organisms. The Prince of Wales thinks they set a course for disaster. The Daily Mail believes that they might cause immunity to antibiotics and anyway will give readers nightmares about Frankenstein. Then there are the French who will not like the thought that seawater can be made to taste like champagne. Yes, there are lots of opponents but the most effective of all will be the EU bureaucracy which, having taken a stance twenty-five years ago, can hardly be expected to change it because of evidence.
Some people will think this is a pity, but probably not many of us. Faced with long winter evenings of third rate TV, most will be quick to sacrifice the advantages of GM. Perhaps then the EU has a useful role after all. I think on reflection I may vote “Remain”.
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